Beto O’Rourke admitted pilfering long-distance service ‘so I wouldn’t run up the phone bill’ during his time in the Cult of the Dead Cow.
Photograph: Loren Elliott/AFP/Getty Images

Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic presidential candidate, belonged as a teenager to the oldest group of computer hackers in US history, he has revealed in an interview.

Members of the influential, so-called Cult of the Dead Cow, jokingly named after an abandoned Texas slaughterhouse, have protected his secret for decades, reluctant to compromise his political viability.

Now, in a series of interviews, group members have acknowledged O’Rourke as one of their own. In all, more than a dozen members of the group agreed to be named for the first time in a book about the hacking group by this reporter, which is scheduled to be published in June. O’Rourke was interviewed early in his unsuccessful run for the US Senate in last year’s midterm elections, where he was narrowly beaten by incumbent Ted Cruz.

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The Cult of the Dead Cow was notorious for releasing tools that allowed ordinary people to hack computers running Microsoft’s Windows program. It is also known for inventing the term “hacktivism” to describe human-rights-driven security work. O’Rourke’s membership could explain much about his approach to politics and subverting established procedures in technology, the media and government.

“There’s just this profound value in being able to be apart from the system and look at it critically and have fun while you’re doing it,” O’Rourke said in the interview. “I think of the Cult of the Dead Cow as a great example of that.”

There is no indication that O’Rourke himself ever engaged in the edgiest sorts of hacking activity – breaking into computers or writing code that enabled others to do so.

O’Rourke was a misfit teen in El Paso, Texas, in the 1980s when he decided to seek out bulletin board systems, the online discussion forums that at the time were the best electronic means for connecting people.

“When Dad bought an Apple IIe and a 300-baud modem and I started to get on boards, it was the Facebook of its day,” he said. “You just wanted to be part of a community.”

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O’Rourke soon started his own countercultural board, TacoLand, which was freewheeling and largely about punk music.

He then connected with another young hacker in the more conservative Texas city of Lubbock who ran a bulletin board called Demon Roach Underground. Known online as Swamp Rat, Kevin Wheeler had recently moved from a university town in Ohio and was having problems adjusting to life in Texas.

Like O’Rourke, Wheeler said, he was hunting for video games that had been “cracked”, or stripped from digital rights protections, so that he could play them for nothing on his Apple, and also looking to connect with like-minded teens.

Wheeler and a friend named the Cult of the Dead Cow after an eerie hangout, a shut-down Lubbock slaughterhouse.

At the time, people connected to bulletin boards by dialing in to the phone lines through a modem. Heavy use of long-distance modem calls could add up to hundreds of dollars a month. Savvy teens learned techniques for getting around the charges, such as using other people’s phone-company credit card numbers and five-digit calling codes to place free calls.

O’Rourke didn’t say what techniques he used. Like thousands of others, though, he said he pilfered long-distance service “so I wouldn’t run up the phone bill”.

Under Texas law, stealing long-distance service worth less than $1,500 is a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine. More than that is a felony, and could result in jail time. It is unclear whether O’Rourke topped that threshold. In any event, the state bars prosecution of the offense for those under 17, as O’Rourke was for most of his active time in the group, and the statute of limitations is five years. Two Cult of the Dead Cow contemporaries in Texas who were caught misusing calling cards as minors got off with warnings.

O’Rourke handed off control of his own board when he moved east for boarding school, and he said he stopped participating on the hidden Cult of the Dead Cow board after he enrolled at Columbia University at age 18.

Hana Callaghan, a government specialist at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, said voters might want to consider both the gravity of any candidate’s offenses and the person’s age at the time.

O’Rourke and his old friends say his stint as a fledgling hacker fed into his subsequent work in El Paso as a software entrepreneur and alternative press publisher, which led in turn to successful longshot runs at the city council and then Congress, where he ended up unseating an incumbent Democrat.

O’Rourke’s writing from nearly three decades ago, under the handle “Psychedelic Warlord”, remains online. He once mused about a world without money and how it could end starvation and class distinctions.